3rd annual feast

I haven't written in a few weeks, and so now I am way behind in writing about events close to the time they happened. Even though I have other things I wanted to write about, I'm going to skip them over and write about the Third Annual Thanksgiving Feast my roommates and I hosted at the Grove (our house). It took place on Tuesday night the 17th, and we had an awesome turnout. I think about 30 people total. We've done this event the last 2 years; it's a fun tradition.

The premise of "The Feast" is that we have all of our college friends over to basically do nothing other than eat insane amounts of food. Us roommates provide the majority of the food but many of the guests bring a dish to share too. We spent all week planning on what food we needed, who would make it, what time to cook it, etc. You may not realize, but tons of planning was involved in order to successfully pull off this event. Christina spent all weekend coming up with the list of food items, assigning it to people, and following up on it. Kristine, Danielley and I also spent a while cleaning up our house and making sure we had enough seating, etc. In my opinion, it looked awesome.

The day of the event, Kristine and Anna (Julia's sister) basically devoted their whole day to planning out the "oven/stove schedule" and baking the turkey, casseroles, and many other dishes. I as usual did some of my OCD driven cleaning, and then when all of the food and desserts were prepared the guests arrived! I was excited because John made it down to Lexington even though it was a week night. It took some rearranging of his schedule for him to be able to come, but he did, just because I told him it would mean a lot to me if he could be there and witness it's amazingness for the first time. So, everyone hung out and talked for a while, and we were all very excited when the food was finally ready. As the title of the event suggests, it really was a "feast". There was enough food for 30 people to get two plates and stuff themselves full- not to mention dessert! I always really like when we do this because when we get everyone together before we eat we say a quick "Thanksgiving" prayer, and it makes me realize how grateful I am to have so many amazing people in my life. I feel like I am very lucky to have so many great friends who have been around through the years and who I still can always have a fun and hilarious time with.

So, after the food was rapidly consumed and seconds were downed, it was time to play the Thanksgiving guessing game we've played the last 2 years. Everyone writes down on a piece of paper one thing they're thankful for, and then one person (traditionally Danielle) reads each one out loud, and everyone else is supposed to guess who wrote what. Some of the papers are genuine things, but the majority are sarcastic and/or sexual. It is usually a hilarious game, and this year it was no different. There were a few slips read that caused everyone in the room to die of laughter- if you were there you know what I'm talking about! We also did a traditional group photo after dinner, one serious and one funny.

After the game a lot of the guests had to leave, but for those who remained and weren't busy cleaning and doing dishes (sorry to my roommates, but someone had to be out of the kitchen entertaining the guests!) we had a fun time playing the game "Apples to Apples". I was really happy with how the evening turned out. The food was fantastic, we had a good amount of leftovers, and a lot of friends showed up I hadn't seen in a while. It was definitely a success! It was a little bittersweet though because this is the last time all of us roommates will be in Lexington for Thanksgiving. Some of the girls might do it again next year, but I won't be here hosting it...